‘Blew It Out Of The Water’: Decoding Trump’s Election Win

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and the founder of Cygnal Polling Group Brent Buchanan on a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

In his third bid for the presidency, Donald Trump was able to overcome past shortfalls to put together a decisive victory – winning the electoral college, the popular vote, and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. We sat down with with pollster Brent Buchanan to go over the numbers.

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JOHN: Joining us now to examine how the political landscape has shifted in the U.S. is Brent Buchanan, founder of Cygnal Polling Group. Brent, thanks for coming on. Good to talk to you again.

BRENT: Thanks, it’s great to be back.

JOHN: Look, we want to start by giving you some well-earned credit: In the weeks leading up to the election, you said we would know the result Wednesday morning. That ended up being true. But on election night you were here at Daily Wire headquarters and ready to call the election for Donald Trump at 10:02p.m. Not being too specific about it — but 10:02p.m. What made you so sure Trump had won?

BRENT: When you looked at some of the key counties within the swing states, you could see that he was doing so well within those counties that what made those counties good for him could be replicated across the other swing states, including places like Arizona and, Nevada, which we’re still counting votes or just beginning to end the polls, at 10:02 p.m.

JOHN: What were some of the swings you saw that were significant? What kind of movement did you see in which counties that were so significant early on?

BRENT: Miami-Dade County has been really interesting because it has a highly Hispanic population, but it’s more Cuban and Venezuelan and that’s not really replicable across the rest of the country. What I was looking at — if you remember from the New York City Madison Square Garden Rally, where you had that comedian who opened for Trump and make a joke about Puerto Ricans living on an island of garbage (and maybe I’m getting that specific reference wrong), but the Puerto Ricans make up the majority of Hispanics in the Orlando area, which is a very different population of Hispanics than Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami-Dade County. So when I saw that he was doing well there, I knew that the mainstream narrative that Trump was going to be hurt by Hispanics because of that comedian’s comment was simply just chatter within the bubble in the elitist class and not actually something that was going to hurt him with voters. You can also go over to Macomb County, Michigan, which is a very working class county that continued to shift towards Republicans and that is a highly unionized county. So that also would tell you that, okay, if Trump is winning union voters who’ve been moving his direction and they’re showing up in significant numbers, that this is going to continue across the rest of the swing states and really the country as a whole. What’s most fascinating in all of this is there were really three elections occurring. There were elections in the swing states, which didn’t have huge shifts from the prior election. You did see a big difference in like Arizona, for example, where Biden barely won it. Trump got over 5% this time. I think that was more a normalization of the state than anything else. But then you had elections in red and blue states, and places like Florida and Texas got even redder. And places like New Jersey — Trump got that to a single digit race. So, where significant money was spent the elections were closer even though Republicans did well. Where money was not spent, Republicans just blew it out of the water. That was a combination of two things: One, Republicans showing up strongly, but also Democrats staying home.

JOHN: Pollsters like you often measure the most important issues to voters in the weeks and months leading up to the election. In this case, it was often inflation and immigration leading the pack. Did that line up with exit polls?

BRENT: It definitely did, and what’s interesting about the top priority question is that it became very politically polarized. And if you remember how the Harris campaign basically closed the same way that Biden tried to frame the end of the 2022 midterms elections — that was “Trump is a threat to democracy and so we have to defeat him to protect our democracy.” So that was an issue that really showed up. In a lot of our polling, it was somewhere in the top two or three leading up to the election. In our final exit poll on election day, it ended up being the number two issue, almost tying with inflation and economy. But if you said threats to democracy was your number one issue, Harris won those voters by 69 points. And if you said inflation and economy was the issue, you won, Trump won those voters by 60. If it was Illegal immigration, Trump won those voters by 89 points, of course. Harris wins the abortion voters and then, when you look at all the other issues, the minor issues strung together, Trump barely lost those. So it was very much kind of two Republican leaning issues and Democrat leaning issues that were hyper partisan. But I really believe that it was simply turnout mechanisms and Republicans did a better job turning out voters who cared about inflation and the economy plus illegal immigration than Democrats did turning out voters who said abortion and threats to democracy — which to me are luxury issues. If you’re way at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you can care about threats to democracy and abortion. But if you’re trying to make ends meet and care for your family, you care about inflation and the economy and illegal immigration, and that’s what won at the end of the day.

JOHN: Now, we at The Daily Wire have paid close attention to the transgender issue for various reasons – including the investigations we’ve done in the past, directing more attention to this issue. How much do you think that issue played into the election results?

BRENT: Huge. And I think it’s not necessarily the thing that helped with the election. I think it is a symptom of a deeper problem for the Democrats, which is they have gone off into this woke ideology, where you’ve got to believe all these things or you’re a bad person. When Republicans are like, well, we like normalcy. Democrats have just gone so much into politics of identity and the majority of the country is rejecting that. We did a post election survey for the American Principles Project, which took a lot of the research that y’all did and then turned it into advertising. And we tested several of the key campaign themes, one being Kamala Harris’s is for “sex changes for children,” she wants to give. Another one was that she wants to give your tax dollars to have “prisoners get sex changes.” We tested the “men in women’s sports” and we tested that they, them “Trump is for you” messaging. What was really fascinating about this is, and I think it is one of the reasons that the diploma divide that has existed with white voters where, if you’re non-college white, you’re shifting hard right. That has now gone into the non-white population. What we found out is that among Hispanic voters who said that sex changes for minors made an impact on their vote, 52% of them said it made them more likely to vote for Trump. Of black voters who said that men in women’s sports was a concern for them, 45% said it made them more likely to vote for Trump. So I think these cultural issues potentially had a bigger impact in moving non-white voters to Trump, while the economic issues were more at play for these white, non-college educated voters moving to Trump. And that’s a really unique story coming out of this election.

JOHN: As you’ve laid out, this was a sweeping shift rightward. Did Trump actually gain ground everywhere or did he lose ground in any particular demographic?

BRENT: Overall, he gained ground because all 50 states moved to the right. Some of the states barely moved to the right, like Washington State, for example, was 0.2% more Republican. But then New York State was 12% more Republican. California was 7% more Republican than the last election. But when you break out some of the individual demographic groups, Gen X was the largest generational shift towards Trump. In 2020, they were Republican +1, Trump +1. And this election they were Trump +13. Seniors kind of stayed the same, Gen Z moved towards Trump. Millennials actually moved against Trump. There were some other shifts in the college educational attainment, where if you had a college degree and you’re white, you got more Democratic. But that was probably the only group you can point to and say, this got worse for Trump. But it’s been a 20 year trend, so I don’t think we can say this is just Trump’s fault. There are a whole lot of other things to look at that say Trump is now taking that diploma divide into the non-white community. One thing I’ll point out is that when Kamala Harris ran for the Senate in California, she ran as an Indian American. And then, in this election, she ran as a Black American. And college educated Indian Americans actually were one of the groups that shifted furthest to Trump. And so like, if that does not define how poorly she did in this election, that she screwed up the one group that should have moved towards her, college educated Indian Americans. Trump was able to get to those folks and it was really the economic concerns for them.

JOHN: You bring up Indian Americans – what about Asian Americans? How did they vote in general this year?

BRENT: Well, it’s not a huge population. It’s kind of a hard group to dig into and the Vietnamese and Indians and Chinese all go into that bucket of Asian Americans. If you were a non-college educated Asian American, you started the shift towards Republicans, and that hadn’t really existed in the past. So I think Democrats are walking into future elections asking themselves, “Who is our coalition?” Because they’re essentially now the party of the white, college educated coastal elites, and those people don’t understand America.

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JOHN: There’s a lot made by the legacy media of the gender divide going into this. And from my understanding, it didn’t quite play the role that we thought it was going to play. How did that end up shaking out?

BRENT: Well, it was still “women leaned more towards Harris and men leaned more towards Trump,” but I think the bigger story is the fact that, historically, in every single presidential election, going back for half a dozen presidential elections, women made up 54% of the voters.And in this election, women only made up 53% of voters, and you’re probably saying, well, Brent, why are you saying that 1% is a, is a big shift, but that is a huge, Breakout trend. and Trump made a strong play for the bro vote on the podcast he went on the way he did his advertising and kind of how the imagery of those advertisements and the music of the advertisements was really geared towards men and it didn’t turn off women. Women 55+, for example, voted for Kamala Harris, but they only voted for her by three points. Young women only voted for Harris, under 55 only voted for Harris by 14 points. Those are really small margins compared to what we saw in 2020 on this gender and age divide. And I think it’s one of the unsung stories of this election in that Trump really bypassed the mainstream media. and went to all these alternative media sources that happen to speak more to men. Joe Rogan is mostly a male audience. Theo Vaughn is almost exclusively a male audience. And they’re also amplified on YouTube. And when you go look at where people consume their information and how they voted in the presidential election, the alternative media sources if you’re getting your news from those places, you are much more likely to have voted for them. Donald Trump. So when, when we ask this media consumption question, one of them is, do you get your media from streaming apps like the Daily Wire? We didn’t say like the Daily Wire, but that would fall in the category of a streaming app. If you get your news from a streaming app, you voted for Donald Trump by 26 points.

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JOHN: Wow. So there’s lots of different ways to sum up what just occurred this year, but part of it is it’s a massive rebuke of the legacy media and revealing that they’ve been dethroned. Do you think it’s fair to characterize the election that way?

BRENT: They did a really good job moving Kamala Harris’s image from upside down, really badly upside down, like Joe Biden, to, only slightly upside down.But they could never get her further than that because they could only reach a certain audience. So, of the people who told us in our exit poll that they get their news from national television, like ABC, NBC, CBS, they voted for Harris by 39 points. Newspapers, if that’s where you get your information, you voted for Harris by 48 points. But then if you get your news from talk radio, it’s Trump +40, Facebook, Trump +22. So, you start to see that they’re losing their grip on their ability to move anything past a certain point. I think we’re just going to continue to see that degrade and degrade as folks realize that they’re not giving them truthful information. And they’re telling people what to think, and they’re not giving them all the facts as they tell people what to think. And that’s why we’re having this segmentation of folks who are listening to podcasts like this, who are subscribing to streaming services. And I believe we’re going to find more and more of that as people seek out the truth for themselves.

JOHN: What about the state of Leftism post-election? Did we just witness the end of the progressive wing of the Democrat party?

BRENT: No, I think the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will never learn the lesson from this election because they’re the same people who ran ads that essentially said, “You voters are stupid, if you knew this information, you’d vote the right way,” which meant for Kamala Harris and Democrats. And they believe that the reason that they’re not winning is because enough people don’t know what they know. And they don’t know how to say it without being condescending to the majority of the country. So, what I think we saw in this election was that this trend of wokeism and progressivism, voters finally stood up and said, this is enough. I’m not doing this anymore.

JOHN: Final question, pretty open – what is a takeaway from this year that you think is not being emphasized or stressed enough?

BRENT: Republicans need to realize that this is not a normal election for us. This Donald Trump is a unique individual that can communicate with folks in a certain way, and that is why you saw in a lot of races, him get more votes than anybody else on the ticket who was a Republican. And the lesson for Republicans out of this need to be, don’t be scared to jump into the cultural issues. Talk about economics in a way that normal people understand. Don’t tell them the economy’s good when they feel the economy’s bad for them, which is basically what Democrats did. And you have to go into these communities and start building relationships with folks because we just can’t take for granted that these non-white voters who moved to Republicans are going to stay with us. They moved to Trump, they did not move to Republicans. And there’s a whole lot of work to still be done in building – real relationships, not just election day relationships with these folks.

JOHN: Sage advice, as always. Brent, thanks so much for joining us. That was Cygnal Polling Group’s Brent Buchanan – and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. 

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